​Many clients have difficulty in letting go of their problem. It’s not surprising. They have lived with the problem for a while; the problem is giving them trouble and it’s worthy of respect. Yet the solution-focused practitioner pops up to say the problem may have nothing to do with the solution – and remind them that it’s the solution that the client wants. That may make sense logically, but from the client’s perspective that can be tough to accept emotionally.

It’s tempting to think that resilience is a fixed personality trait, maybe even something that we are born with. But be reassured, the ability to bounce back from failure and to cope with everyday difficulties is something that can be learned and developed by anyone.

People sometimes suspect that Solutions Focus practitioners underestimate the seriousness of their clients’ issues. People have problems, dammit, lots of problems. And these problems profoundly affect them. They are troublesome, nasty, frightening. So don’t ignore our complaints or our pain, as you start questing for solutions, they say.

Complaining is natural. For some people I know, it is virtually an art from. And complaining clients is not something that is going to stop a good solutions-focused practitioner in their tracks.

Ranting and venting of steam can have their place within an SF conversation. It's OK for people to have feelings (of any type) and to express them. As a webinar participant put it neatly the other day, ‘we all experience the Present Imperfect' .

People complaining are mostly going into detail about aspects of their issue that they don't want. If you listen carefully, you can find or deduce a strand in there too about what they do want - and which they are willing to address.

Our task as coaches, therapists or consultants is to discover that strand and amplify that part of the conversation.

Pointing out people’s mistakes is supposed to be conducive to learning, and is a mainstay of traditional education systems.​

​In British schools until the mid-twentieth century, you could expect to be punished for mistakes. Not just for breaking school rules, but for getting things wrong academically; for example, if you got facts, sums or vocabulary wrong when you were supposed to know them by now. In Dickensian times, the punishment might be a harsh beating.

There is value in noticing when students make mistakes within a curriculum, as the errors may indicate the current level of learning. These assessments function as border indicators and alert the teacher and student as to where to put their attention for what to learn next.

This is the ‘trial-and-error’ method, in which under controlled conditions, you have a go, then see if your answer is right or wrong, close or distant; and you adjust accordingly to get back on track.

For that purpose, there’s no need for the mistake to carry any negative emotional charge. And few would now argue it’s a valid moment to reach for the birch, create a source of shame, embarrassment or any other special mention.

Instead, we can treat the errors lightly or gently; as an opportunity to have another go, to find a more accurate way of getting the problem solved, the phrase translated, or the facts right.

The danger of these myths is that they encourage mistakes in the wrong contexts. And they blind us to the infinitely greater learning from getting things right. So let's learn to learn from success and getting things right.

​1. Keep things in proportion, appropriate to the stakes. If the mistakes don’t much matter, then don’t give them excessive psychological weight. It’s a good idea to reduce needless perfectionism.

2. In a learning environment, treat mistakes lightly as a signal to have another go at succeeding or progressing. It's why we invest in simulators.

3. If you make mistakes in your organisation, it's worth saying sorry, as that builds trust and reduces excessive fear of making mistakes. It's most unfortunate, for example, that politicians cannot admit to making mistakes.

4. Value feedback - your own and other's useful stories. That sets you up to make use of feedback for fast adaptation. It’s a great improvisational and learning skill to notice how we are doing in relation to what we are aiming to do. Correct your course by spotting and quickly dealing with errors.

5. Learn from other people's mistakes - generally a list of tempting moves to avoid saves time and pain, and gets you more quickly to the ‘Success Stack’, so you can learn from what your mentor ultimately got right.

People keep telling me that we learn most from our mistakes. I think it’s a cliché and misleadingly wrong. The only good stuff I've seen from mistakes is an appreciation not to make that same mistake again, and sometimes a sense of personal resilience - though that occurs only if the mistake is followed by a subsequent success. All the rest of the 'good stuff' - if we mean learning and creativity - comes from success, from finding out what the thing to do actually is (as distinct from what it is not, the mistake).

Have you heard the Mistakes Myth? It’s in two parts. First this myth says we can't learn without mistakes; then it adds that we should embrace our mistakes. Well up to a point…

The first part is plain wrong – or, as one might call it, “a mistake”. It seems obvious that it is possible in theory at least that you can learn any process by following it correctly without mistakes. Whether it’s tying a shoelace, playing a sonata on the piano, or even assembling flat-pack shelving. You probably won't get it right first time, but you just might. And in order to do it a second time, you definitely need to do it a first time. If it did happen to go right first time, and your memory was functioning well, you could be said to have learned how to do it – and would prove that to be the case by getting it right on each subsequent occasion.